The horror genre is structured around encounters with the unknown. Yet the meaning of these encounters (narratively, as well as in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality) remains in flux, even within overarching myths such as that of the vampire. One example is the Swedish novel Let the Right One In, which centers around a boy's encounter with a MTF transgender vampire. This text simultaneously employs the threat of Cold War ideologies, with the possible invasion into Sweden by Soviet missiles triangulated around the drama of "encountering," and befriending, the vampire. This panel invites papers that analyze such complex modern encounters within horror, and how the genre stages encounters with social, political, and economic concerns. Another topic which this panel can address is how modern/postmodern texts stage encounters with older stages of the gothic and horror genres. Papers could include: how myths about vampires, or other horror archetypes, have changed; how readers/audiences encounter horror and what this says about their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.; how horror mediates and/or rejects normative political discourse; how modern "horror" encounters other contemporary genres; how tropes of "horror" frame encounteres within modern discussions of terrorism, immigration, and Otherness.

This is a panel call for the 20th Annual (dis)junctions Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate Conference at the University of California, Riverside. This year's general theme "encountering with(in) texts," examines the impact of situatedness, unexpectedness, and/or unpreparedness on "face to text" encounters with media objects, embodied encounters negotiated through or overdetermined by texts, and representations of "encountering" within texts. Please visit www.disjunctions2013.org for more information on this year's theme, our other subject and discipline specific panel calls, and Keynote Speaker Dr. Nicholas Mirzeoff.